The InstaDMG guide suggests using separate drives for image creation to improve performance (i.e. one for reading the disk images and packages, one for the temp files and the output images). If I have am using a dedicated Mac mini (2009 server running 10.6 client) and an external FireWire 800 drive, what is going to give me the best performance? Drive to drive within the mini? Internal to FW 800 external? Internal RAID 0 to FW 800 External RAID 0? Forget the whole thing and just load up the internal drive bays of the Mac Pro (2006) that I use as my personal machine and have it work in the background?
Experiences? Opinions?
Many of us can’t get an SSD, nor would we be able to stick one in a build machine or connect it over a bus those speeds would saturate anyway. If you’re like me, you have bare, large-enough harddrives lying around, though.
I’d get an icydock RAID 0 FW 800 enclosure(~200 at newegg in the US) and point the cache and output folder options there. There’s also a Lacie FW800/eSATA 2TB RAID 0 box available for not much more than that. Using 3.5″ drives means a larger cache on each disk, and almost all of the time you need fast write, so keeping it all on that LUN is a good idea.
I have people telling me instadmg isn’t worth it because their organization can’t afford an ssd, and here’s a relatively inexpensive alternative.
Allister
The fastest is going to be between the internal bays in your MacPro (two RAID 0 sets would be the best), as those are full sized drives on internal connectors. But I would bet that the mini with internal and external RAID 0 is not going to be far behind.
Unless you are doing something I/O intensive on your computer, InstaDMG runs just fine in the background. That is how I always worked on it. The only things you have to remember:
1) Don’t open any of the .dmgs that are used by the process while things are in-flight. Things can get a bit confused if you do.
2) Don’t try and use the installer, especially not the GUI one. Because there is only a singel helper daemon, and I cadge it to only work on the target dmg, the installer will hang when used outside that cage.
3) Especially at the end of the process you will get occasional hangs when InstaDMG starts something intense. There is only one really bad point (when it is scanning for bad symlinks), otherwise you should be able to play videos on top of it (my regular practice while developing).
[QUOTE][u]Quote by: Allister[/u][p]The InstaDMG guide suggests using separate drives for image creation to improve performance (i.e. one for reading the disk images and packages, one for the temp files and the output images). If I have am using a dedicated Mac mini (2009 server running 10.6 client) and an external FireWire 800 drive, what is going to give me the best performance? Drive to drive within the mini? Internal to FW 800 external? Internal RAID 0 to FW 800 External RAID 0? Forget the whole thing and just load up the internal drive bays of the Mac Pro (2006) that I use as my personal machine and have it work in the background?
Experiences? Opinions?[/p][/QUOTE]
I have this exact setup, and after testing a few permutations of scratch and main disks, I found the fastest configuration to be to run the system off RAID 0, and use a fast FW800 drive for scratch. On small images you might get close or slightly faster the other way around, but because you’ll have the ASR scan for restore happen at the end on the system disk, the RAID 0 helps a lot here.
Crossing my fingers that I won’t have to be self-servicing my Mini’s hard drives any time soon, but at least the 2009 models give a bit more elbow room when the time comes.
Thanks for those who have shared their experiences so far. Will definitely go with a dual RAID 0 setup, whether on my own Mac Pro or on the Mac mini server with FW800 external.
My current setup is to use an external Other World Computing Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 with 4 500 GB drives in a RAID 5 setup connected via FW800 for scratch. I’m using an iMac from last year right now… I might migrate to a laptop with a eSATA card and see what the speed difference is there.
(I also use the RAID 5 as a backup for the instadmg folder, all the packages and such that I build in-house, and disk images I use…. hence the reason not to go with a straight RAID 0)
I have an SSD in my Macbook Pro i5 and I can rip through InstaDMG faster than my XServe with a fiber raid attached to it. The SSD really makes a difference.